They were also a mainstay of loggers, who could fill an entire train car with boards cut from a single tree. (via Resurrecting A Forest – Phenomena: The Loom)

Contemplating the deextinction of the American Chestnut (which was nigh on annihilated not by logging, but by a blight), I was struck by this photo.

In it I was struck by a momentary sense of historical discontinuity, and with that basic fact that I try to keep in mind in my work: that the past, which seems so familiar, is far stranger, far rarer than it seems to us from moment to moment. 

When someone from the eighteenth or nineteenth century  writes of the majesty of the American forests, well …